A Writer Captivated By the Chaos Of New York

By JOSEPH BERGER

Published: April 7, 2005

New York was Saul Bellow's Second City.

Chicago was where he grew up, went to college and eventually settled. But he lived in New York as a young writer, and New York's frenzied streets, its apartments with bathtubs in the kitchen and cockroaches in the toaster, the benches on its traffic islands filled with idlers and the old, the onion rolls from Zabar's, even the pigeons, exerted a powerful and deeply ambivalent pull on him.

He went on to evoke the city's ?gr?ntellectuals and eccentrics, its connivers and kooks, its complicated women and vacillating men in novels like ''Seize the Day,'' ''Herzog'' and ''Mr. Sammler's Planet.'' Mr. Bellow described their stage with all his crusty precision. He told of Moses Herzog, who suffers on his sofa, while in the background lies ''the trembling energy of the city, a sense and flavor of river water, a stripe of beautifying and dramatic filth contributed by New Jersey to the sunset.''

Mr. Bellow was the poet of a single building, the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway and 73rd Street, the setting for a large portion of his 1956 novella ''Seize the Day.'' He described it as a Baroque palace, ''with towers, domes, huge swells and bubbles of metal gone green from exposure, iron fretwork and festoons.''

''Under the changes of weather it may look like marble or like sea water, black as slate in the fog, white as tufa in sunlight,'' he wrote. ''This morning it looked like the image of itself reflected in deep water, white and cumulous above, with cavernous distortions underneath.''

But he was more often the poet of a particular kind of tormented New Yorker, the kind like Herzog who can dash off letter after letter to people in power -- even if they're no longer alive -- to air his aching grievances, knowing redress is far in the distance. Or he could depict a characteristic sidewalk speculator like Dr. Tamkin in ''Seize the Day,'' a psychologist more obsessed with the agonies of the stock market than those of his patients.

''I think about people, just because they have a few bucks to invest, making fortunes,'' Tamkin lectures Tommy Wilhelm, a poignant schnook who, like many a New Yorker saddled with alimony payments and a disapproving parent, dreams of a killing. ''They have no sense, they have no talent, they just have the extra dough and it makes them more dough.''

Mr. Bellow was smitten too with the vigor of certain New York women, like Ramona, Herzog's girlfriend, who ''walked with quick efficiency, rapping her heels in energetic Castilian style.''

''Herzog was intoxicated by this clatter,'' he wrote.

Dr. Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist who befriended Mr. Bellow and his wife, Janice, in his last decade, said, ''Everyone identifies him with Chicago, but there was a deep New York tie.''

''It seemed that there was something about the mania and tumult of New York City that matched the mania and tumult of some of the characters,'' Dr. Doidge said.

The critic Stanley Crouch speculated in an introduction to the 1995 edition of ''Mr. Sammler's Planet'' that Mr. Bellow picked New York for the novel's backdrop because it was the ''place of action,'' where he could have his hero say significant things about America.

''Mr. Sammler could not be in a better setting if he were to wrestle with the identity of the United States,'' Mr. Crouch wrote.

Mr. Bellow came to New York, like many Midwesterners, hoping to conquer, but he did not live in New York all that long, mostly in the 1940's and early 50's, when he wrote a few pieces for the legendary Partisan Review. (He, Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg translated Isaac Bashevis Singer's ''Gimpel the Fool'' from Yiddish into English in 1952, winning Singer a larger American audience.) As a writer, Mr. Bellow found New York claustrophobic, a place with too many other writers who would paralyze his muse with shoptalk and gossip.

But he had some quintessential New York experiences. He underwent Reichian therapy, then in vogue, with a Queens therapist and, according to his biographer James Atlas, lay naked on a couch trying to purge his body of its defenses ''by acting out rage and sexual tension, shouting, gagging, grimacing, pounding the couch.'' Mr. Bellow's later comic skepticism may explain why more than a few New York analysands and ex-analysands were Bellow devotees.

Mr. Bellow hated the apartment where he lived with his first wife, Anita, in a red brick building in Forest Hills in what he described in an unpublished story as ''the colossal dingy borough of Queens.'' But for an escape valve he often visited the book-crammed Village apartments of friends like the poet and short-story writer Delmore Schwartz, the model for the charmingly mad Humboldt of ''Humboldt's Gift.'' According to Mr. Atlas, Mr. Bellow, whose marriage was breaking up, had his own room ''off to the side'' in Macdougal Alley.

But after he returned to Chicago he visited New York often, befriending people like the cultural critic Harold Rosenberg, the novelist Ralph Ellison and Saul Steinberg, the cartoonist who captured the solipsism of this city. His publishers and his agent, Harriet Wasserman, were here, and so were his girlfriends, and he often combined business with pleasure -- or whatever pleasure a man often at war with women could take.

Mr. Bellow was never sentimental about New York. In ''Mr. Sammler's Planet,'' the story of an aging Holocaust refugee, an intellectual with Old World manners, he describes a quandary many New Yorkers faced in the days when the city was plagued by criminals. Sammler daily rides a bus from the 42nd Street library to his West Side apartment, and with his one good eye is fascinated by a pickpocket he regularly encounters. Sammler says nothing and wonders instead whether he had ''been seen seeing.''

''Must he give up the bus?'' the story continues. ''It was always Mr. Sammler's problem that he didn't know his proper age, didn't appreciate his situation, unprotected here by position, by privileges of remoteness made possible by an income of fifty thousand in New York -- club membership, taxis, doormen, guarded approaches. For him it was the buses, or the grinding subway, lunch at the automat.''

Mr. Bellow describes Sammler's thoughts in ways that some critics labeled racist and others said exemplified his fearless exactitude in shaping a fictional character. But there was no quarreling from New Yorkers with Mr. Bellow's accuracy in describing the reaction Sammler got to an earlier effort to report the pickpocket.

The phone booth he first tried to use was smashed and smelled of urine, and after other pay phones failed and he finally got through from his apartment, the police were not greatly interested. The officer told Sammler that he would have to put his name on a waiting list.

Photo: Saul Bellow waiting for the subway in 1975. He spent relatively little time in New York City, but wrote about it often. (Photo by Neal Boenzi/The New York Times)(pg. E7)